Blog > 2016

Introducing The Grothendieck Team

10 December 2016 Alan McSherry 4 mins read

Introducing The Grothendieck Team

The Grothendieck Team

Hi everyone, it's my pleasure to officially announce the new team known as The Grothendieck Team! The team has been named after Alexander Grothendieck, a German-born French mathematician who became a leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry. They have been committed to Ethereum Classic by IOHK in order to build a Scala client for ETC based on IOHK's

Professor Aggelos Kiayias joins IOHK as Chief Scientist

21 October 2016 Charles Hoskinson 4 mins read

Professor Aggelos Kiayias joins IOHK as Chief Scientist

Professor Aggelos Kiayias joins IOHK as Chief Scientist

We are delighted to announce that Professor

Aggelos Kiayias
, professor in cryptography at the University of Edinburgh, has joined IOHK as Chief Scientist.

Prof Kiayias is the pre-eminent academic in the field of blockchain security. He has produced pioneering work providing the rigorous analysis necessary to secure…

IOHK | Latvia. Executive update

19 October 2016 Jeremy Wood 3 mins read

IOHK | Latvia, Executive update - Input Output HongKong

IOHK | Latvia. Executive update

For some of the IOHK team it was their first time meeting in person when we gathered in Latvia this month for an intensive working session to push forward several of our key projects. As a distributed company we usually collaborate remotely, across time zones, so coming together to exchange ideas was inspiring. For two weeks in the beautiful capital city of Riga, we advanced…

A Blockchain-free Approach for a Cryptocurrency

12 October 2016 Mario Larangeira 5 mins read

A Blockchain-free Approach for a Cryptocurrency - Input Output HongKong

A Blockchain-free Approach for a Cryptocurrency

A major technical challenge of the cryptocurrencies is to find a way to safely increase the throughput of the system in terms of number of transactions. An approach to tackle this limitation is to review the role of the blockchain, or even to take that data structure out of the picture completely. In this post, we will comment a paper by Boyen, Carr and Haines named Blockchain…

IODB storage engine

11 October 2016 Alexander Chepurnoy 5 mins read

IODB storage engine - Input Output HongKong

IODB storage engine

Log-Structured-Merge trees (LSMT) are a good fit for modern SSD storage and offer good performance and reliability. LSMT are also a good fit for blockchain storage requirements (snapshots, consistency, proof of existence). This blog post describes a database designed specifically for blockchain storage, inspired by existing LSMT implementations (RocksDB, COLA tree).

The current state-of-the-art LSMT implementation is probably RocksDB, with in-memory write buffers, parallel compaction and snapshots. Another similar algorithm are COLA tree. That is a btree-like structure where each node has separate write buffer. Finally there is SSTable from Cassandra